George Pitcher is an Anglican priest who serves his ministry at St Bride's, Fleet Street, in London – the "journalists' church".

Why Lord Falconer is shamed by this young woman's death

I have a news analysis in today's Telegraph alongside our story that the parents of poor Kerry Woolterton, who was allowed to take her own life because she told paramedics that she wanted to, are planning to sue the hospital's staff . The medics left Kerrie to die because they feared they would be prosecuted under the Mental Capacity Act (2005) for "assault". It seems they will be sued anyway – couldn't happen to nicer people.

Here is an extended version of the analysis I wrote:

Almost exactly two years ago, Colin Woolterton heard that his 26-year-old daughter, Kerrie, had killed herself by drinking a hideous poison, apparently in a depressive state about her incapacity for childbirth.

The dreadful truth is that emergency services and medical staff could have saved Kerrie’s life. You don’t have to be a parent to understand where that knowledge must place Mr Woolterton. You just have to be a human being.

Try this: Just for a moment, imagine that the Police visit your home to tell you that your child has committed suicide. Now imagine that they tell you that the ambulance and hospital staff could and would have saved her life, but she handed them a letter asking them not to. So they didn’t.

This is where we have arrived in our attitude to suicide in Britain today. A disturbed young woman, with all the promise of adult life before her, is left to kill herself, because in her current circumstances she wants to.

Apparently, doctors who could have treated Kerrie didn’t do so, because they feared that they might have been prosecuted for assault under the Mental Capacity Act (2005). This legislation forms part of a raft of laws and “guidance”, introduced on this Government’s watch, which promotes the individual’s right to die over our society’s responsibility to save their lives if we can.

It passed onto the statute book to enable terminally ill patients to have a degree of autonomy over their medical treatment. It was intended to allow those who were dying, or who knew that their condition could only end in their death, to refuse medical treatment so that nature could take its course.

In its intent, this is important and altruistic legislation. As medical science advances, we can live to grossly extended, grotesquely burdened and undignified old ages. Within a couple of decades, it is said, we could effectively be immortal, short of the serendipity of accidents and the actions of our own hands.

It follows that we are at a pivotal era in medical ethics and human morality. We are asked to decide whether we want or should live forever, or whether we believe that there is a more “natural” span and narrative to human lives. If we decide on the latter, then we are going to hang on to, like old friends, the diseases and conditions that have carried away our forebears, rather than live out lives in which we forget our youths and watch our children grow decrepit with us.

That kind of hell was, I imagine, what the living wills legislation was aimed at. It can’t, please God, have been intended to allow distressed and depressed twenty-somethings, in otherwise good health, to kill themselves because they want to, with our blessing.

For that reason alone, I believe that the medical profession called Kerrie Woolterton’s case tragically wrong. But it wasn’t just Kerrie’s sad little “living will” that led to the medics’ decision not to save her.

There is a public attitude that is now pro-suicide, fostered by the euthanasia lobbyists Dignity in Dying, Lord Falconer’s frustrated assisted-suicide amendments in the House of Lords the commercialisation of self-destruction by Swiss clinic Dignitas. Want to kill yourself? Of course you do. You have that right. Go ahead.

These people have successfully usurped what generations of humankind have known as the sanctity of life. That doesn’t have to be a religious belief. It is simply the intuition that we hold and value human life over the taking of it. And the pro-death lobbyists and Lords, evidently, have now infected the intuitive responses of our medical emergency services.

They would argue they were only following legal orders. Tell that to the Woolterton family.